In this file photo, the
logo of the online reviews website Yelp is shown in neon on a wall at the
company’s San Francisco office.

The operator of
the Yelp website does not, by allowing viewers to rate its business reviews,
become liable for defamatory content that the reviewers have posted, the Ninth
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday.

Yelp’s
system, which allows viewers to rate reviews from one to five stars, does not
convert those reviews into Yelp-created content, Judge M. Margaret McKeown
wrote for the panel. Yelp, she said, is therefore an “information content
provider” under §230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The
statute provides in part that “[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer
service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information
provided by another information content provider.” It expressly preempts any
conflicting state law.

A
Washington state locksmith, Douglas Kimzey, sued after two negative reviews
were posted.

Switch Claimed

Kimzey
claimed the negative review about his business was actually about another
business, and said Yelp transferred it to his business in an attempt to extort
him to pay to advertise with the company. A person claiming to be the same
reviewer posting a second review confirming that the first review was about
Kimzey’s business, Redmond Mobile Locksmith, and not about “Redmond Mobile,”
which Kimzey said was a “fraud operation.”

U.S.
District Judge Richard A. Jones of the Western District of Washington granted
the defense motion to dismiss for failure to state a cause of action.

The
district judge was correct, McKeown wrote, because Kimzey, who represented
himself, could not plausibly plead around §230.

The
appellate jurist said the rating system is based on users’ input and is not
content created by the company. Under federal law, the decision said, Yelp is
not liable for content it gets from its users.

Negative Review

The
ruling focused on the libel lawsuit filed by, the owner of a Washington state
locksmith business that the court said received a negative review on Yelp in
2011.

She
called Kimzey’s allegations “threadbare” and said there were no facts to
support his allegation Yelp fabricated content under a third party’s identity,
as the complaint alleged.

“We
fail to see how Yelp’s rating system, which is based on rating inputs from
third parties and which reduces this information into a single, aggregate
metric is anything other than user-generated data,” McKeown said.

The
panel also rejected Kimzey’s claim that Yelp should be held liable for
distributing reviews to search engines.

“To
the extent Kimzey’s complaint aims at alleged downstream distribution of the
starred review, § 230’s immunity defeats the claim…,” McKeown wrote. “Just as
Yelp is immune from liability under the CDA for posting user-generated content
on its own website, Yelp is not liable for disseminating the same content in
essentially the same format to a search engine, as this action does not change
the origin of the third-party content….Simply put, proliferation and
dissemination of content does not equal creation or development of content.”